Frozen Synapse

Frozen Synapse is a tactical turn-based strategy game, in which you control some kind of cybernetic soldiers squads, which basicaly have an empty brain and obey every command you give them.
Because of this, you have to give them all the commands and orders that they have to do, such as movement, aim, ignoring enemies in sight, focus enemies, duck, etc.
Each mission can have various objectives such as defending units, killing all the enemies, defending areas, killing certain units, escort missions, etc.

There are 5 types of units in the game:

Machine gun unit:

Shotgun unit:

Sniper unit:

Rocket launcher unit:

Granade launcher unit:

These units have their own unique advantages and utilities, and it's up to you to use them to your own advantage, but it's the standard weaponry advantages. If you are already familiar with them, you should know already these:

- Machine gun specs:
These units are the standard unit used throughout the game, they are good at mid range, decent at close range and very weak at long range. They can fire multiple shots at once and, thus, are good at handling a few units at the same time. But because of their rapid fire, it takes a while for them to get a shot with accuracy. Correct positioning improves their hitting chance.

- Shotgun unit specs:
These units are excellent at close range, an excelent unit to camp in a corner and shoot everything that comes in front of him. With this huge advantage at close range, they're unable to shoot anything at mid and long range.

Sniper unit:

These units are extremely good at taking out targets at long range, but because of this they take a long time to aim and fire which makes them practically hopeless against targets at close range and against well covered mid range targets.

Rocket launcher unit:

These guys are excelent at blowing the enemies out of their covers, and their hits have a huge area of damage. The problem with them is that each shot takes a long time to recharge (practically one shot per turn) and you need a wall or an object to trigger the explosion. Yes, direct hits on units don't make the rocket explode.

Grenade launcher unit:

These guys are like the rocket launchers but with quite some diferences. They don't destroy walls or objects, you can easily send a grenade bouncing around without making any direct contact with the enemy:

They have the same area of damage capabilites as the rocket launcher, and the explosion is triggered by a certain time passed. No walls are required, making it a little harder to hit with compared to the rocket launcher, although it's a much safer and more controlled explosion then the rocket launcher.

In each game using the available terrain is the key to success, either taking cover in walls to pass by the enemy, using light cover to get a slight advantage at taking out the enemy:

Or even ducking in sizable objects to avoid enemy fire:

The most interesting feature of this strategy game is the ability to be able to give orders, to than simulate the enemy units' movement and actions to try and see the outcomes of your choices and maybe predict your enemy's moves, but since you can give various diferent orders of movements, aims, etc. you can't always predict what will happen.

The game has multiplayer, score boards and you can play multiple games at the same time with your own pace since it's a turn based game you don't need to be always online to give orders to your units.

Currently playing...

Well, since we hastilly started our blog while under a severe workload, we didn't really keep it running up until now. Now that our work's finished (With a sigh of relief...), we'll start actually posting.

For now, I'll leave you with some of the games we're currently tackling and activelly playing.

To start it of, here you go:
League of Legends

In-game Screenshot:















For anyone familiar with Defense of the Ancients, this should be no surprise. League of Legends brings quite a few amounts of RPG elements, while being, mostly, a strategy game. You, the "Summoner", are able to invoke a wide array of champions - and they keep launching more and more! - to the fields of Runeterra, the imaginary world LoL takes place in. With two different maps (3v3, Twisted Treeline, and 5v5, Summoner's Rift), your goal is to bring down the enemy's Nexus (essentially, the place where you, the summoner, are controlling your champion from.). Placed at strategic points, but on a fairilly symmetrical map, the problem to point is really the lack of more maps. There has been a long time since LoL launched, and two maps might bore you quickly.

However, the aburdly high amount of possible combinations you can juggle with will keep you going almost indefinatelly. So many champions, so much customization (through a rune system, through the items you buy in-game, through Summoner spells and through team compositions) can really make each match unique.


The controls are fairilly simple and work well. Each and every champion uses exclusivelly Q, W, E, and R as abilities. Their individual powers are unique (Well... you're bound to find similar "Next melee strike is stronger" skills, but with 80+ champions (320+ spells), that's bound to happen).

The system balance of "paid VS free" is absolutelly perfect. Champions aren't fully available to you, and must be unlocked to be available at all times. There are always 10 free champions, rotated each week, but no one guarantees the champion you want will be there. All of them have 2 prices available, IP (influence points, earned by playing) and RP (Riot points, bought). Buying the champion offers no other benefit. Alternativelly, champions have skins that can be bought though RP alone, but are purelly cosmetical.

Such a complex system is pretty hard to balance, but mostly, if both teams are a well thought out roster, they both have a good shot at winning.

The role of a supporter, in my oppinion, is at the moment not emphasised much, and that's something I don't particularly approve. There are maybe 3 pure supporter characters worth playing, while most other supports can be built as tanks or spellcasters.

As for solo content, don't expect too much of it. You can create custom games against bots, but their AI is beyond pathetic. They can catch a newcomer off guard and actually be hard at first, but once you know the basics, they can be completelly thrashed to absurd scores (Such as 50+ kills with no deaths. That won't happen on normals unless against the WORST possible players.). There is a Co-op VS AI that is at least more tolerable, and requires at least a good teamwork, but even with some minor effort, you can still faceroll the overcomitting bots with ease into 16 minute matches. (To give you an idea of how fast that is, you can only surrender a game at 20 minutes+.).

Overall, especially for being free, this game has a very high potential. If you're a fan of the style, you may find a few oddities; LoL does take a quite unique approach to the style.



We're playing on US servers (since the game was US exclusive when it first came).

We're still figuring how often we'll update - we most likelly won't have a set schedule at first.

Until than, good luck.

Indeed, what's with the name?

First off, I happily agreed to take part on the blog. I'll be assisting with some posts, equally about the two areas we both love, and whichever we really feel like throwing out.

As a kick-off, mirroring my partner, I'll introduce myself - by my name. Cloud actually has a multitude of meanings - Some of you might recognise some of them. First, it was almost an alter-ego of my own self back in mid school - since me and a few pals were writing a fastasy story. The project never really took form, but damn, were those some fun times. My own character, Cloud, had a Lightning-element affinity (the story revolves around 9 (!!!) main characters, one per "element", all with one "negative" element), and was in many ways matching my own personallity. Even today, we haven't entirelly given up on the dream of turning this into something real. I probably still have some chapters lying around... :P

From there on, the two other interests on the name are about music and games. Cloud Nine being a song from one of my favorite bands - Evanescence. As it matched my alter-ego's name, it was further considered a basis for all my internet nicknames. And, of course - and perhaps the thing you'd recognise this name from - Final Fantasy VII's Cloud Strife, the protagonist of one of the most famous RPG series of all time - Squareenix's Final Fantasy (At the time, they were Squaresoft), and the first big step into 3D - and arguably one of the games that "sold" the Playstation One system. The story compelled me in a way few books have ever been able to - as an RPG fan, the game did feel too easy with relativelly few grinding, but all I could see was the amazing storytelling. I cleared the game way beyond 5 times (Fully ginding extras and level 99s).



And, oddly enough, in my later life, Cloud Computing becoming a standard in programming paradigms only served to tell me that that name was a perfect match to my own self. I still use constant permutations of Cloud to match my characters in video games, or wherever a nickname is requested, really. I do have other names, but they're mostly randomly created to avoid having an enormous list of CloudA, CloudBs lying around :P

What's with the nickname?

It's an old nickname from the times when I was in mid school, it was created from my real 1st name and a game character, because I didn't have a clue of what nickname I should use, for sites, blogs, web browser games, etc, and since then, I still pretty much use this one.

The Pedro part is a common name in my portuguese language, which it relates to other languages names such as Peter, Pierre or Pietro. As for the Firzen part it's the name of a character which I loved in a game called LittleFighter 2, he was a fusion character which controled ice and fire,it is one of the end bosses of the stage mode of the game. If you don't know the game, it's a beat'em up type of fighting game, with a good number of different type of characters with special abilities and spells. If you like fighting games give it a try it's a nice free game to pass some of your time and even play with your friends.



One of the best parts of the game is the massive number of fan created characters and modified games throughout the web, some of them are overpowered or badly done, others are wonderfully well done and original. The main reason for this, is because it's an easily modifiable game, even if you don't have advance programming skills, you can easily open up the game files with the right editor and you can change the information of each character or spell (making good sprites is another story).

Blog's First Post

Hi there, just started my new blog today. This blog will be used to talk about games, programming or other computer related stuff, some internet stuff too and maybe more things in the future (who knows?).

Enjoy.